Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of a Taunton Daily Gazette series, Kicking the Habit, exploring the reasons why recovering opiate addicts quit and embarked down the long road to recovery.

Hy-Rraine Rather went first. Tamara Ingraham prompted him to start. She wanted a little time, a few more moments to organize her thoughts, before she shared memories from her past life as an addict.

“My mother and father were addicted to heroin,” Rather said. “So I’m no stranger to the drug and side effects. It’s been around me since before I knew what it was.”

Rather and Ingraham are now partners in an insurgency. Their shared enemy: heroin dependency. The battlefield is a Silver City neighborhood with more than its share of addicts.

Sick of attending friends’ funerals, the Granite Street pair have been helping to pass out overdose antidotes as part of an aggressive anti-overdose campaign.

“It all started for me when I was 21 and I had a killer wisdom tooth problem,” Rather, now 33, recalled. He once counted himself among the addicted. “It was impacted. They prescribed me antibiotics and 12 Percocet.”

The prescription painkillers opened Rather’s eyes to a new kind of high.

“It gave me the feeling everything was OK,” he said. “But after a few days, and it’s not in your system, you get sick as a dog. It led to me prolonging the toothache.”

He got a refill. That’s how the story of addiction starts for so many. Rather calls it “the cycle,” and for him, the cycle’s symptoms hit him hard and fast.

“Restless leg syndrome, hot and cold flashes, mood swings,” he recalled, wrapping his arms around his shoulders like he was bracing against a chill. “You’re barking at people for saying it’s sunny outside. I was killing my body. Killing my character. I couldn’t get out of bed without a connection.”

Rather’s habit escalated. He watched the pills grow from five, to 15, to 30 milligrams.

“My family stopped treating me like the star I used to be,” he said. “I finally woke up one morning and said to myself, ‘I don’t want to be here anymore.’”

Five years had passed him by. But he awoke.

Ingraham, also 33, recalled hitting the occasional joint and drinking socially at 12.

“My home life wasn’t the greatest,” she recalled. “My house was the party house.”

As a child she lived in Brockton. She was introduced to hard drugs when she moved to the suburbs.

Page 2 of 3 - “I was the new kid on the block in Middleboro and I wanted to fit in,” she said. “I was looking for escape. And then my first love was killed in a car accident when I was 16.”

Climbing from a well of grief, Ingraham focused on education, won scholarships and eventually earned a place at a local college, majoring in criminal justice. She played a pretty awful deck pretty well.

“Then I hooked up with some people at this small college,” she said. “It was sort of segregated, and I found people like me. But we went out to the clubs five nights per week.”

Prescription drugs led to experimenting with cocaine.

“I said I’d never do that,” Ingraham recalled. “That’s what my mother was doing. But I’m telling myself I’m not as bad as her. I wasn’t smoking it. I’m sniffing it.”

She hit the bottom hard.

“I wanted to end my life at 22,” she said. “My car got impounded, I lost my job. I lost my girlfriend. My family said, ‘You need to get some help.’”

She checked into an inpatient hospital-based recovery program.

“Someone at the psychiatric ward asked me, ‘Do you think you might be a drug addict?’ I did club drugs. No one had ever asked me that.”

By the time Ingraham had spent most of a hard decade partying, her mother had seen the light and started down her own path to sobriety. An influential negative role model was evolving.

“My mother was five years sober, but we weren’t close,” she said. “When that woman asked me if I was a drug addict, I answered her. I said, ‘I guess I am. I’ve been doing drugs from 12 to 22.”

Ingraham realized change was possible for her too. The confrontation and hospital stay led to a 12-step recovery program and a halfway house. Ingraham has now been clean since June 29, 2002.

She uses the word “clean,” not “sober.”

“I knew I didn’t want to die,” she said. “I really did want to live. My party had been over for quite some time.”

Though nearly a dozen years have passed since her sobering epiphany, Ingraham still fears relapse every day.

“I’m never going to stop being an addict,” she said. “I’m a recovering addict.”

Rather and Ingraham have taken the initial steps toward founding their own community group, with the working title “Inspiring Rainbows of Change Spectrum (IROC Spectrum).”

Page 3 of 3 - “Now, as an adult with a voice, I feel obligated to do my part,” Rather said. “I’m not judging or lecturing anyone. I’m simply providing education and the necessary tools for all those who need it.”

Rather and Ingraham want to help find productive activities for children in their neighborhood. They want to educate their neighbors.

They want to help keep addicts alive until these struggling men and women, with whom they share so much history, reach their own epiphanies and seek help for themselves.

For now, they’re hoping to save lives by passing out one vial of overdose antidote at a time.

“I know of five individuals who overdosed, but thankfully were around someone who had Narcan,” Rather said. “It is a lifesaver. I believe that wholeheartedly.”

Rather and Ingraham dream about opening a youth recreational center, complete with an arcade, boxing gym and recording studio. They’re looking for local professionals who may be willing to donate their services to help make this dream a reality.

The city’s unprecedented surge in heroin overdoses has abated for now. Local law enforcement, and many others, hope the downward trend continues. So far in 2014, heroin has claimed 10 lives in Taunton, according to Taunton police. In past weeks, the overdose numbers have held steady with only a slow upward trickle addiing to the statistics. City police think maybe a bad batch of heroin has been depleted. Some advocates are hoping prevention efforts are helping a bit.

“Hopefully (we’re) setting the tone to inspire change,” Rather said. “As an adult (and a) parent I believe we all have a role to play. The future depends on it ... (I’m) hoping to change at least one person’s life.”